The Tampa Bay Times published a powerful editorial about the Legislature’s enactment of yet another voucher program for private and religious schools. Needless to say, the Legislature does nothing for public schools other than to divert funding to nonpublic schools, enact mandates, and harass teachers.
The schools that get vouchers will not be subject to the school letter grades foisted on public schools. They will be free to take the students they want and throwout those they don’t want. They don’t have to follow the state curriculum standards or take state tests. Their teachers don’t have to be certified. They are relieved of any accountability, while public schools are submerged in it.
The editorial begins:
They approved the death sentence for public education in Florida at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. Then they cheered and hugged each other. The legislation approved by the Florida House and sent to the governor will steal $130 million in tax money that could be spent improving public schools next year and spend it on tuition vouchers at private schools. Never mind the Florida Constitution. Never mind the 2.8 million students left in under-funded, overwhelmed public schools.
The outcome of this year’s voucher debate in the decades-long dismantlement of traditional public education was never in doubt. It was sealed when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was narrowly elected governor in November and quickly appointed three conservatives to the Florida Supreme Court. The overhaul of the court emboldened the Republican-led Legislature to approve the creation of vouchers that clearly are unconstitutional, confident that an expected legal challenge will be rejected. Elections have consequences, and this is a devastating one.
Don’t be fooled. This legislation is not just about helping children from the state’s poorest families attend private schools. It does more than take care of 13,000 kids who are on a waiting list for the existing voucher program that is paid for with tax credits. It raises the annual income limit for eligibility from $66,950 for a family of four for the current voucher program to $77,250 for the “Family Empowerment Scholarship Program.’’ That income limit will rise in future years, and so will the state’s investment in vouchers. Welcome to a new middle class entitlement.
Florida cannot afford this free market fantasy. The state ranks near the bottom in spending per student and in average pay for teachers. Hillsborough County has hundreds of teacher vacancies, broken air conditioning systems in dozens of schools will take years to repair and voters just approved a half-cent sales tax to help make ends meet. Pinellas County would need $1,200 more per student in state funding just to cover inflation over the last decade. Yet Florida will send $130 million to private schools next year for tuition for 18,000 students.
Legislators who voted for SB 7070 talked about empowering families and school choice. Parents in most communities already have plenty of choices. Nearly 300,000 students attend more than 600 publicly funded charter schools, and more than 225,000 students attend choice or magnet schools in their districts.
State Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran was in the House chamber for the vote. He previously served as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. His wife operates a charter school. He doesn’t like public schools or unions.
Jeb Bush was also present, happy to see another big step towards the vouchers he believes in. Ironically, he is the father of both the school choice movement and Florida’s harsh accountability regime (for public schools). I wonder if any journalist ever asks him why his beloved voucher schools are exempt from all accountability.
Despite the hostility of the elected officials to public schools, I’m not yet ready to call them dead. There are nearly three million students in Florida. Ten percent go to charters (at least half of which are operated by for-profit entrepreneurs), and another five percent choose to go to religious schools, most of which are inferior by any measure to the public schools.
More Than 80% of families choose public schools. When will the public wake up and start voting for elected officials who support the public schools to which they send their children?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A sad day indeed. I will boycott Florida – why spend my hard-earned, publicly funded salary in a charter school, “right-to-work” nirvana?
Within 20 years, watch for news photographs of Florida’s public school classrooms resembling those of third-world nations.
and weirdest truth: in a state most adamant that climate change is nothing but smoke and mirrors brought by liberals, in twenty years many of FL’s public school classrooms may well be fully submerged
If Florida is threatened by climate change, and it is, Mar-A-Lago will be under water.
There’s a big sinkhole at Mar-a-Lago.
(Let that sink in.)
Donnie is our president
Although he did not win
A popular plurality,
And that is just a sin.
Ask me what I think of him.
Oh, where do I begin?
He’s a freaking hero to
The skinhead Aryans.
It ought to be a clue that he
Has such great popularity
With skinhead Aryans.
Wink wink it’s not an accident
That one so twisted and so bent
Should be a freaking hero to
The skinhead Aryans.
It soon will be that time of year
I never really miss much,
When Trumpty Dumpty will decry
Imagined wars on Christmas..
Our Obergruppenführer’s gone
Back to the heart of Dixie.
But polar Barr is now in place
To engineer a fix; he
Will try his best to exorcise
The ghost of Robert Mueller
And so prevent the sure demise
Of Putin’s favorite ruler.
That self-made man
Who built his wealth
With one small loan from Daddy
Of near a billion dollars
To his little Scottish laddie.
cx: nigh a billion or
of a billion dollars, nearly,
The image of these legislators hugging and cheering this result is sickening.
I keep thinking to myself that when they win, they actually lose, because everyone gets to see that their policies don’t actually work. But then I think to myself that when they win, we all lose.
For Jeb Bush and his cronies, “Winning” means underfunding the schools that 80-85% of children in Florida attend while sending the money to for-profit charters and completely unregulated subpar religious schools.
Here’s another story that is related to this post, a Florida teacher abandoning the profession:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/teacher-retires-from-toxic-profession-in-facebook-post-i-will-not-miss-what-education-has-become-015939592.html
It is time for public school parents, teachers and concerned citizens to take to the streets and march on Tallahassee. People should not accept this public theft of public dollars without having any say about this. Nobody should accept this loss of democracy and taxation without representation in violation of the state constitution. Why should such a vast amount of the school budget be spent on private education of questionable quality while the public schools starve?
Parints: Come spend yore voucher at Billy Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Florida School. All my relatives teach thar, and they is smart, locked, and loaded! We offer a full, online kurriculum of blended larnin’, supplemented by Bible lessons from some of the finest preachers in the state. Wait’ll you see our excitin’ corses! Theirs English (established by Jesus as the official language of America), scyence (Back six thousand years ago, before the Earth wuz created, they wuz just water everwhere, and then the Lord set the dome of heavin in the sky to hold the waters back), HIS-story (How HIS will has been communicated through the ages through prophets such as Adam, Noah, Elijah, and Donald Trump), economics (When rich people get tax breaks, this makes you better off), cosmetology (run by one uh Billy Bob’s gal friends), and online GED prepurashun. And, at our school, your child can go to school with his or her kind, the way it wuz intended. So, come on down to our BBQ in the K-mart parkin’ lot and sign that voucher check over to Billy Bob Shepherd. Cause the day of the gubbermint school is ended.
Whar else is students gonna larn in theys civics corses bout how Obama put chemicals in the water to turn high-school kids transgender? Now, peple of Flordia, you have choices!
Further evidence, as if any’s needed, that Florida is a political sunshine shithole. It’s the Cayman Islands on the mainland.
They approved the death sentence for public education in Florida at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. Then they cheered and hugged each other.
Truth.
I don’t understand how Florida schools are funded. Can rich communities like Parkland (average house worth $900,000) tax themselves to fund their public schools?
Every Florida teacher and parent should spend weekends for the next four years registering and educating voters at their local strip mall so as to sweep away De Santis and Co. I know I would if I lived in FL. Make flip books with a few powerful graphics to do quick-but-powerful lessons on the situation and how to fix it.
Where the money comes from in Florida:
State support, mostly from the 6 percent sales tax on goods and services, but also from net proceeds of the Florida Lottery and taxes on slot machines in Broward and Miami-Dade
Local support, almost entirely from property taxes levied by counties
Federal support from various sources, including the Every Student Succeeds program and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program
In 2013-2014, according to the National Center for Education Statistics at the USDE, 8.75 percent of revenues for K-12 education came from the federal government, 46.24 percent from state governments, 33.46 percent from local governments. The rest came from private sources (mostly for private schools). I don’t have, ready to hand, percentages of funding, in Florida, from these various sources, but I suspect that these percentages of funding are similar. Per pupil funding in the US varies enormously from state to state and from district to district because differences in state spending and in revenues from local property taxes.
The Florida legislature also just passed, via a party-line vote, legislation expanding its “armed guardians” program allowing Florida teachers to take a course and then carry guns.
The people who voted yes on this legislation clearly haven’t taught. Teaching today is HECTIC. The most pressing reality is that THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH TIME. Somehow, in the 3 or 5 minutes between bells, you have to deal with the note from the office about the kid marked absent in your homeroom who says she was present, with the kid who didn’t get her marked quiz back, with the fact that you have to go to the bathroom, and with revising the Essential Question for the next lesson on your whiteboard so you won’t get a demerit when the Assistant Principal walks in because you didn’t use the approved verb.
As a consequence, teachers, being human, continually make mistakes: they leave the answer key on the desk, they leave their car keys on the counter in front of the teacher mailboxes, they leave their satchel full of those graded papers sitting next to their car in the parking lot, they leave their purses in the cafeteria. Now, what happens when it’s not an answer key, car keys, a satchel, a purse, but a gun? I can hear the announcement now, over the PA system: “Any student who finds Mr. Pearson’s Glock, please return it to the central office.”
And which teachers in the building are most likely to sign up for that gun course? The most level-headed and responsible and psychologically stable among them? What happens when that teacher snaps or decides that he is being threatened or decides that that cell phone in the hand of that student screaming at another student down the hallway looks like a weapon?
Oh, don’t worry. They are going to go through extensive training, we’re told. Police officers go through far more extensive training, and they still make egregious mistakes. But when they make them, they are not surrounded by a hundred kids.
You are so right. Florida’s reckless policies are a recipe for disaster.
These people are clueless. They are like the guys at the Fordham Institute who sit in their offices and read report summaries sent out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and consider themselves, as a result, “thought leaders” and “experts” in US K-12 education.
It would be really, really funny to see one of these people a) take the standardized tests for high-school graduation and b) try to get through a week in an actual classroom.
I once offered to swap jobs for a day with someone who complained about how little teachers worked…..he refused to take me up on that offer……I wonder why??????
Just proves he’s 99% stupid. The 1% of functioning brain cells he has put in a systems veto.
If it weren’t for luminaries Jeb! & BDeVos putting lipstick on this pig, no one would pay attention. Just another backwater doing stupid stuff.